


The Hopes And Fears Of All The Years

by Merixcil



Series: Advent Fics 2018 [10]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Gen, jokers general jokeryness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25229812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Gotham criminals say that Batman goes soft on Christmas. The truth of the matter is far less glamourous.
Relationships: Joker (DCU) & Bruce Wayne, Joker (DCU)/Bruce Wayne
Series: Advent Fics 2018 [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824643
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	The Hopes And Fears Of All The Years

The rumour mill believes that the Batman is more lenient on Christmas. The truth of the matter is that it’s such a busy night, he physically can’t catch up to everyone. Bruce Wayne has parties and galas to attend and in turn, the Bat is supposed to run down every two bit criminal taking advantage of what most of the big names regard as a truce. 

Four in the morning and Bruce is stumbling through East Midtown. Hardly late by his standards but he’s barely stopped moving in days. Weighed down with all the carbs and sugar that flood the holiday season and running low on backup as all the kids who celebrate have begged off patrol duties for the night to be with their families or stay in and pretend to wait for Father Christmas. 

The streets are dark, neon bled from the night as Christmas Eve ticked over to Christmas Day some hours ago. The cover provided by the street lights is insubstantial, barely illuminating the pavement up ahead. Bruce’s arms ache from the decel lines and his grappling gun is in need of repairs that he’s unlikely to get round to till Boxing Day. Tonight he’s walking, and the shadows may be his friend, but not so much as a good visual on any perps the GCPD are liable to miss. 

Police departments up and down the country are stretched thin tonight. Big ticket items only. Petty theft can wait till later. 

Up ahead, a shop door creaks open. Could be that the owner stayed in very late, but it seems unlikely when the lights have been out for as long as Bruce has been making his way up this road. The street light tending to this block has busted, leaving him with plenty of room to manoeuvre through the dark, not even having to worry about hugging the wall as the flash of a ‘sorry we’re closed’ sign circles back to nothing as the invader lets the door fall closed. 

Silence is easy, Bruce could do it in his sleep. In three short steps he’s on top of the invader, getting a fistful of their shirt and causing them to drop their spoils in surprise. The loot hits the ground without a sound, and the thief lets out a yelp. “Fucking hell, Batsy.”

Bruce bites back a groan of frustration as he pushes The Joker up against the glass of the shop front. “What are you up to?”

“This is a shop!” The Joker points wildly to the sign overhead and Bruce doesn’t so much as blink away from his face. He’s not letting the clown get away with such an obvious ploy. “I was shopping.”

“You were stealing.”

“Not true! I left the money on the counter. Didn’t even worry about the change, figured if they were feeling overstuffed they could put it in their shoes.” Joker’s eyes flick wildly over Bruce’s face. “What, nothing? C’mon, that was a solid Dutch Christmas joke.”

“No it wasn’t.” Bruce snaps back. He reaches for the handcuffs he keeps strapped to the back of his utility belt, not at all looking forward to the inevitable hassle of trying to keep Joker under lock and key. Of all the nights to catch him doing something as innocuous as unarmed robbery. 

Correction: He probably is armed, he just hasn’t had cause to hurt anyone tonight. 

The cuffs catch and Bruce has to look away for a second to get them free. Joker seizes the opening, locking himself around Bruce’s arm to twist it clear of his chest before delivering a powerful if inconsequential bite to one of the thumbs of the gauntlets. Typically he's graceful and devious, skirting the edge of Bruce’s reach till he gets bored and either allows himself to be caught or skips away and turns the night into an all out chase. Tonight he does neither of these things, backing up for as much of a run up as he can give himself before Bruce snaps back into action and then charging at the Batman full force. 

For what has never felt like more than a loosely assembled pile of bones, full force from The Joker hits pretty hard. They fall to the floor, Joker still wrapped around Bruce’s midsection, legs fighting to mobilise the others’. 

Bruce swats at his head, thumps his back. Joker giggles long and loud and buries his head in the breastplate of the batsuit. “Honey, that hurts about as much as a bat wing to the face.”

“Get off.” Bruce pushes at Joker’s shoulders and the clown shakes his head in defiance. 

“Shan’t.”

“Joker!” Bruce groans, letting his head fall back against the tarmac.

Still laughing, Joker unwinds himself from Bruce’s waist and hoists himself up on his unwieldy long arms. “Ya know, we could skip the foreplay tonight, if you like. I promise not to tell.”

A pinky finger rises up in front of Bruce’s face. He swats it aside. “You’ve been stealing.”

“Oh come on, Bats.” Joker roles his eyes. “It’s fucking freezing out here! And someone got blood all over my last best coat. What was I supposed to do? All the shops are closed.”

A quick glance over the clown's shoulder reveals that he was pilfering from a mid-range vintage shop. Screwing up his eyes, Bruce decides that he never heard Joker say anything about blood on his coat. He doesn’t have it in him to start a full murder investigation tonight. “You can’t-”

“You look tired, love.” Joker smiles, and even in the dark Bruce can see where the corners of his mouth stretch towards a vanishing point somewhere around his ears. “Let me make this easy for you, just this once.”

In the morning Bruce will go downstairs and will practice being the happy patriarch he spends so much time play acting as. He’s not supposed to worry about anything on Christmas, and according to every clock in town, it’s now Christmas.

They don’t make a song and dance out of it, but when they clamber to their feet, Joker holds out a hand to help the Batman up. “Easy, big boy.” He scoops up the coat he may or may not have stolen, a floor length fur monstrosity that makes him look three times as wide as his slim figure usually amounts to. He pulls the ruffled collar in close and his eyes gleam down at Bruce. “Much better.”

Bruce nods, mute, and follows him off into the shadows. 

They wind up taking the fire escape up to the top of an old tenement housing block overlooking Robinson Park. Joker produces a flask from somewhere deep within his coat that he claims contains mulled wine but smells like it contains mentholated spirits. Bruce wrinkles his nose and declines to drink any. 

Joker roles his eyes. “God, Bats. Live a little, why don’t you.”

“I have no intention of killing myself with unsafe alcohol.”

“Unsafe alcohol. Listen to yourself. I bet your tee total. Oo! That would be fun, walking into an alcoholics anonymous chapter and seeing your ugly mug staring back at me. Would you like to share the greatest hits of your personal trauma with the class, Mr Batman?”

Bruce ignores him, looking out over the park, which sits dark and dead in amongst the lights of the city. On the ground, things may seem lifeless, but the overall effect is not diminished. To the south, Downtown rises out of the mess of residential buildings in all it’s skyscraper, New World, Glory. It doesn’t much feel like Christmas, save for the cold. It could be any old day of the year. 

“Just kidding.” Joker digs Bruce in the side. “You’re fucking gorgeous, even with those monster eyebags you’re working on.”

“You can’t see my eye bags.”

“But I can sense them. It’s like we’re twins, you cut one of us and we both bleed.”

Bruce shakes his head. “We’re not twins.”

“Too right we’re not. Some of the thoughts I’ve had about you would be positively sinful if we were.” Joker lets out a belt of laughter before staggering to his feet, approaching the edge of the rooftop at a pace that makes it look like he intends to fall. 

Bruce doesn’t stop him. If that’s how the clown wants to go, he’ll happily fill out a police report on the incident. 

Predictably, Joker stops one pace short of a call out to Gotham General. He spreads his arms wide, gesturing to all of Gotham at once. “Picture it, Batsy. You and me, together like this, every night. We could half the crime rate in a week, no point playing the game if the glamour of Gotham’s top celebrity crashing the party has been taken out of the equation. Only the elite players would be left, me and Ivy and old Jonny boy. We could redefine crime in this city, you and me. 

Maybe. Bruce has to laugh. “I’m not trying to redefine crime, I’m trying to end it.”

“The one appears to have led to the other.” Joker flicks out the skirts of his new coat as he spins round, looking like a Hollywood starlet from the thirties, posing for an invisible camera. “Just keep doing what you’re doing, Bats, and they’ll have to name a whole crime wave after you come the turn of the century.”

“Please. You’re too kind.” Bruce replies, voice flat. It’s not like he’s never thought about it, the damage that he might do just by existing. But there’s no way for him to change what he’s already done so he just keeps going, ungentle, into that good night. 

Joker raises his flask up high, a poor man’s elegy to Lady Liberty. “To another eighty odd years of this shit. Right, Bats?”

“Right.” Bruce replies. Even though he’s only in his fifties, even though he doesn’t have anything with him to drink. He watches Joker wrestle a mouthful of his ‘mulled wine’ down his throat and doesn’t complain. Some nights you have to just let happen to you, leaving the consequences to the morning. 

**Author's Note:**

> This work was originally posted as part of a multi chaptered 'advent fics' fic that I'm trying to split up. If you think you've read it before, you probably have


End file.
